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Phase II and Iraq

by Henry A. Kissinger

The Washington Post - January 13, 2002

As military operations in Afghanistan wind
down, it is well to keep in mind President
Bush's injunction that they are only the first
battles of a long war.

An important step has been taken toward the
goals of breaking the nexus between
governments and the terrorist groups they
support or tolerate, discrediting Islamic
fundamentalism so that moderates in the
Islamic world can reclaim their religion
from the fanatics, and placing the fight
against terrorism in the context of the
geopolitical threat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq
to regional stability and to American friends
and interests in the region. But much more
needs to be done.

Were we to flinch, the success in
Afghanistan would be interpreted in time as
taking on the weakest and most remote of
the terrorist centers while we recoiled from
unraveling terrorism in countries more
central to the problem.

Three interrelated courses of action are
available:

To rely primarily on diplomacy and
coalition-building on the theory that the fate
of the Taliban will teach the appropriate
lessons.

To insist on a number of specific
corrective steps in countries with known
training camps or terrorist headquarters,
such as Somalia or Yemen, or those engaged
in dangerous programs to develop weapons
of mass destruction, such as Iraq, and to take
military action if these steps are rejected.

To focus on the overthrow of the Saddam
Hussein regime in Iraq in order to change
the regional dynamics by showing America's
determination to defend regional stability, its
interests and its friends. (This would also
send a strong message to other rogue states.)

Sole reliance on diplomacy is the preferred
course of some members of the coalition,
which claim that the remaining tasks can be
accomplished by consultation and the
cooperation of intelligence and security
services around the world. But to rely solely
on diplomacy would be to repeat the mistake
with which the United States hamstrung
itself in every war of the past half-century.
Because it treated military operations and
diplomacy as separate and sequential, the
United States stopped military operations in
Korea as soon as our adversaries moved to
the conference table; it ended the bombing
of North Vietnam as an entrance price to the
Paris talks; it stopped military operations in
the Gulf after the Iraqi withdrawal from
Kuwait.

In each case, the ending of military pressure
produced diplomatic stalemate. The Korean
armistice negotiations consumed two years,
during which America suffered as many
casualties as in the entire combat phase; an
even more intractable stalemate developed
in the Vietnam negotiations; and in the
Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein used the
Republican Guard divisions preserved by
the armistice to restore control over his
territory and to dismantle systematically the
inspection provisions of the armistice
agreement.

Anti-terrorism policy is empty if it is not
backed by the threat of force. Intellectual
opponents of military action as well as its
likely targets will procrastinate or agree to
token or symbolic remedies only. Ironically,
governments on whose territory terrorists
are tolerated will find it especially difficult
to cooperate unless the consequences of
failing to do so are made more risky than
their tacit bargain with the terrorists.

Phase II of the anti-terrorism campaign must
therefore involve a specific set of demands
geared to a precise timetable supported by
credible coercive power. These should be
put forward as soon as possible as a
framework. And time is of the essence.
Phase II must begin while the memory of the
attack on the United States is still vivid and
American-deployed forces are available to
back up the diplomacy.

Nor should Phase II be confused with the
pacification of Afghanistan. The American
strategic objective was to destroy the
terrorist network; that has been largely
accomplished. Pacification of the entire
country of Afghanistan has never been
achieved by foreigners and cannot be the
objective of the American military effort.
The United States should be generous with
economic and development assistance. But
the strategic goal of Phase II should be the
destruction of the global terrorist network, to
prevent its reappearance in Afghanistan, but
not to be drawn into Afghan civil strife.

Somalia and Yemen are often mentioned as
possible targets for a Phase II campaign.
That decision should depend on the ability
to identify targets against which local
governments are able to act and on the
suitability of American forces to accomplish
this task if the local governments can't or
won't. And given these limitations, the
United States will have to decide whether
action against them is strategically
productive.

All this raises the unavoidable challenge
Iraq poses. The issue is not whether Iraq was
involved in the terrorist attack on the United
States. The challenge of Iraq is essentially
geopolitical. Iraq's policy is implacably
hostile to the United States and to certain
neighboring countries. It possesses growing
stockpiles of biological and chemical
weapons, which Saddam Hussein has used
in the war against Iran and on his own
population. It is working to develop a
nuclear capability. Hussein breached his
commitment to the United Nations by
evicting the international inspectors he had
accepted on his territory as part of the
armistice agreement ending the Gulf War.
There is no possibility of a negotiation
between Washington and Baghdad and no
basis for trusting Iraq's promises to the
international community.

If these capabilities remain intact, they could
in time be used for terrorist goals or by
Saddam Hussein in the midst of some new
regional or international upheaval. And if
his regime survives both the Gulf War and
the anti-terrorism campaign, this fact alone
will elevate him to a potentially
overwhelming menace.

From a long-range point of view, the
greatest opportunity of Phase II is to return
Iraq to a responsible role in the region. Were
Iraq governed by a group representing no
threat to its neighbors and willing to
abandon its weapons of mass destruction,
the stability of the region would be
immeasurably enhanced. The remaining
regimes flirting with terrorist
fundamentalism or acquiescing in its
exactions would be driven to shut down
their support of terrorism.

At a minimum, we should insist on a U.N.
inspection system to eliminate Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction, with an
unlimited right of inspection and freedom of
movement for the inspectors. But no such
system exists on paper, and the effort to
install it might be identical with that
required to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Above all, given the ease of producing
biological and chemical weapons, inspection
must be extremely intrusive, and experience
shows that no inspection can withstand
indefinitely the opposition of a determined
host government.

But if the overthrow of Saddam Hussein is
to be seriously considered, three
prerequisites must be met: (a) development
of a military plan that is quick and decisive,
(b) some prior agreement on what kind of
structure is to replace Hussein and (c) the
support or acquiescence of key countries
needed for implementation of the military
plan.

A military operation against Saddam
Hussein cannot be long and drawn out. If it
is, the battle may turn into a struggle of
Islam against the West. It would also enable
Hussein to try to involve Israel by launching
attacks on it -- perhaps using chemical and
biological weapons -- in the process sowing
confusion within the Muslim world. A long
war extending to six months and beyond
would also make it more difficult to keep
allies and countries such as Russia and
China from dissociating formally from what
they are unlikely to join but even more
unlikely to oppose.

Before proceeding to confrontation with
Iraq, the Bush administration will therefore
wish to examine with great care the military
strategy implied. Forces of the magnitude of
the Gulf War of a decade ago are unlikely to
be needed. At the same time, it would be
dangerous to rely on a combination of U.S.
air power and indigenous opposition forces
alone. To be sure, the contemporary
precision weaponry was not available in the
existing quantities during the Gulf War. And
the no-fly zones will make Iraqi
reinforcements difficult. They could be
strengthened by being turned into no-
movement zones proscribing the movement
of particular categories of weapons.

Still, we cannot stake American national
security entirely, or even largely, on local
opposition forces that do not yet exist and
whose combat capabilities are untested.
Perhaps Iraqi forces would collapse at the
first confrontation, as some argue. But the
likelihood of this happening is greatly
increased if it is clear American military
power stands in overwhelming force
immediately behind the local forces.

A second prerequisite for a military
campaign against Iraq is to define the
political outcome. Local opposition would in
all likelihood be sustained by the Kurdish
minority in the north and the Shiite majority
in the south. But if we are to enlist the Sunni
minority, which now dominates Iraq, in the
overthrow of Saddam Hussein, we need to
make clear that Iraq's disintegration is not
the goal of American policy. This is all the
more important because a military operation
in Iraq would require the support of Turkey
and the acquiescence of Saudi Arabia.
Neither is likely to cooperate if they foresee
an independent Kurdish state in the north
and a Shiite republic in the south as the
probable outcome. A Kurdish state would
inflame the Kurdish minority in Turkey and
a Shiite state in the south would threaten the
Dhahran region in Saudi Arabia, and might
give Iran a new base to seek to dominate the
gulf region. A federal structure for a unified
Iraq would be a way to deal with this issue.

Creating an appropriate coalition for such an
effort and finding bases for the necessary
American deployment will be difficult.
Phase II is likely to separate those members
of the coalition that joined so as to have veto
over American actions from those that are
willing to pursue an implacable strategy.
Nevertheless, the skillful diplomacy that
shaped the first phase of the anti-terrorism
campaign would have much to build on.
Saddam Hussein has no friends in the gulf
region. Britain will not easily abandon the
pivotal role, based on its special relationship
with the United States, that it has earned for
itself in the evolution of the crisis. Nor will
Germany move into active opposition to the
United States -- especially in an election
year. The same is true of Russia, China and
Japan. A determined American policy thus
has more latitude than is generally assumed.

But it will be far more difficult than Phase I.
Local resistance -- especially in Iraq -- will
be more determined and ruthless. Domestic
opposition will mount in many countries.
American public opinion will be crucial in
sustaining such a course. It will need to be
shaped by the same kind of decisive and
subtle leadership by which President Bush
unified the country for the first phase of the
crisis.

The writer, a former secretary of state, is
chairman of Kissinger Associates, an
international consulting firm.